Moderator: Alex Diaz-Hui, Princeton University
In his 2013 review of Charli XCX’s debut studio album True Romance, Pitchfork writer Marc Hogan despairs at the growing tendency to treat Internet platforms like genres in their own right. For Hogan, this kind of “technology-based shorthand” includes both earlier disparagement of Charli’s singles as “fucking terrible Myspace music” and the association of her eventual debut with the aesthetic sensibilities of popular microblogging site Tumblr. Eleven years later, still riding the aftershocks of Charli’s Brat summer, the close relationship between digital cultures and pop music feels as inevitable as ever, from the algorithmically- generated playlists and social media pages that structure our consumption (Galloway, Goldschmitt, and Harper 2020) to the growing expectation that our favorite artists double as influencers, tastemakers, and brands in their own right (Vesey 2023). And yet, even in this increasingly digital and disconnected musical landscape, questions of the body and embodiment are never far behind. This panel brings together papers that consider this intersection of music technology and the body across four distinct case studies, reflecting on the ways that users remix, reprogram, cover, and camp. As the panelists consider subversive cover songs, nostalgia-imbued music media, the seeming paradox of using AI to drive technostalgia, and the radical potential of accessible queer signifiers, we understand embodied listening and music fandom as a practice that transcends eras and upends framings of contemporary music cultures as disembodied or depersonalized. How do we maintain a connection to the voices, bodies, sounds, and technologies of the past? What are some of the ways that technology helps music and listeners play dress up? And how do we continue to listen, perform, record, and accessorize in ways that foreground bodies and embodiment, even — and especially — in the context of our digitally mediated world?
Amy Skjerseth, “Wearing Out Genres: The Cover Song as Radical Refashioning”
How do singers who perform cover songs wear or refashion the voices and genres associated with the “original” singers? In this paper, I explore cover songs as a form of embodied fandom that rehearses familiar debates in popular music: the status of the original versus “copy,” the stickiness of genre categorizations, and perceived markers of “authentic” singing. I examine how Chance the Rapper transforms Nelly’s 2002 “Hot in Herre” into a country rock bop. Chance performed this cover in December 2021 on Jimmy Fallon’s That’s My Jam, a Tonight Show spin-off that showcases music and comedy games. The “Musical Genre Challenge” selects a song for Fallon’s guest to sing in a completely different genre—supposedly selected randomly, but the show’s high-polished performances seem preplanned. For critic Jessica Wang, Chance adapts Nelly’s hip hop/rap hit with a “silky smooth [...] southern accent so convincing you might just think you’re at the Grand Ole Opry” (2021). Wang emphasizes Chance’s vocal suaveness as if it’s only through cunning that a Black rapper has pulled off country music, much like the reality show’s audience reactions racialize a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing perception of Chance’s voice and accent. These reactions to his cover’s embodiment of country underline the recording industry’s long association of country music with whiteness, despite recent calls to acknowledge country’s roots in Blackness (Giddens, 2019; Royster, 2022; Beyoncé, 2024). Moreover, the audience’s surprise recalls rapper-turned-singer judgments about T-Pain that separated rapping from singing in Black virtuosity. As I argue, fashioning one’s voice into a supposedly antithetical genre from the original can expose the arbitrariness of genres and other aesthetic judgments about music (Brackett, 2016). By exploring cover songs as something artists can wear in order to refashion expectations about genre, vocality, and race, I show their force as cultural intermediaries in the music industry and beyond.
Morgan Bimm, “The Children Yearn for the Cords: Tech Anxieties, iPod Nostalgia, and the Resurgence of Wired Listening”
Chris Anderson, “Sonic Hauntology, Technostalgia, and the Implications of AI-Generated Retro Aesthetics in New Music Production”
Morgan Bimm, "The Children Yearn for the Cords: Tech Anxieties, iPod Nostalgia, and the Resurgence of Wired Listening"
In the midst of a retro tech renaissance that has seen retail giants like Urban Outfitters selling refurbished iPods and campaigns to evade Apple’s DRM to preserve “lost” clickwheel-era games, there’s another nostalgia-tinged marker of bygone MP3 cultures making its way back into cultural relevance: wired or corded headphones. One recent explainer connects the newfound popularity of wired headphones to their affordability and functionality. It’s far easier to ensure lossless audio, reports SoundGuys (2024), by plugging in. Other explanations for the phenomenon are more ephemeral, rooted less in tangible benefits and more aligned with the new cultural and political relevance of “vibes” (James 2021). An Instagram account with over 16k followers, Wired It Girls describes wireless Apple AirPods as “functional and practical, which is the antithesis of cool. We use them because Apple forced us to.” In this paper, I examine the cycles of nostalgia that have contributed to 2000s MP3 cultures’ seemingly unshakeable place in our collective, cultural imaginary — or, as music writer Niko Stratis (2023) wryly observes, how “time make[s] easy fetishists of us all.” How do wired headphones represent a tangible and literal tie to the past? How have the aesthetics of vintage music technology also been invoked to signal certain ideas about one’s gender, class, privilege, and subcultural capital (Thornton 1995)? And in what ways might this apparent rebellion against the consumer logics and homogeneity of today’s technologies be unknowingly replicating certain stories of music’s materialist histories note for note? This paper explores wired headphones as more than a reactionary tech impulse to argue that this moment of technological remix culture can teach us something about the surveillance capitalism that defines contemporary streaming, the power of wired media as signifier, and what room for resistance we have left.
Chris Anderson, "Sonic Hauntology, Technostalgia, and the Implications of AI-Generated Retro Aesthetics in New Music Production"
Advances in music recording software and virtual instruments have empowered music creators with a greater set of tools to produce content. Yet many producers harbor a nostalgia for older vintage and retro music aesthetics as evidenced in music that presents what writer Simon Reynolds (2011) considers endless retrospection within the start of the twenty-first century. This nostalgia is not only a longing for the sounds of the past but also manifests as a longing for vintage recording methods and retro equipment in a form of technostalgia (Burns 2021). A twenty-first century fetishization of vintage gear, analog synthesizers, and the tactile nuances of tape recording has led to a resurgence of music technologies in both hardware and anachronistic software plug-in forms, while music styles such as vaporwave, chillwave, and synthwave reimagine retro aesthetics through recycling the consumer market-driven aesthetics of the 1980s in films, video games, television programmes, and advertising (Ballum-Cross 2021). This paper argues that not all musical styles that integrate retro aesthetics of the twentieth century are a pastiche of consumer kitsch but are instead in critical opposition to the reliance of retro aesthetics in popular music. Mark Fisher discusses sonic hauntology as a style of music that is not so much a longing for retro aesthetics but is instead a critique on culture’s current reliance on nostalgic depictions of the future that cloud the sense of imagining a different future (201
